"Porch Sofa" reviews

The press is starting to review "A Porch Sofa Almanac". Also, # 1 Best Seller in Saint Paul Pioneer Press's local nonfiction last Sunday Thought you might enjoy:

http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/103937433.html

http://knitthink.typepad.com/flyoverland/2010/09/a-porch-sofa-almanac.html

Working in stone.

A friend of mine up north owns a beautiful old stone house on a small lake. It was designed and built, rock upon rock, by an old Finn named Arvid more than sixty years ago, and his work is purely and simply art. The place is holding up well, but there was one defunct doorway my friend wanted to close off—to make part of the stonework—and he wanted to do it in Arvid’s style.

You don’t find master stonemasons just anywhere these days, but after asking around, he finally found the right guy—a man about fifty—a poet who works in granite, not words.

My friend and I stood and watched the man work the other day. He is infinitely patient and deliberate, and he melds his stonework into Arvid’s with respect for the old Finn and an understanding of how he worked.

The two men never met. It’s just one stone man reading the work of another, appreciating the thought and craftsmanship, matching the style right down to the mortar mix.

It’s no small feat. Arvid built perfectly flat walls with square corners. So this isn’t just a matter of piling up rocks and slathering them in concrete. Every stone has to be studied and hand-split. It’s a matter of finding the flat plane embedded in the rock, then using a hammer and cold chisel to reveal it.

Over the years, the man has acquired a reverence for the stone. He says every piece of granite is a billion-year-old living thing.

Each stone has a place in the wall—a spot where it is meant to be. If not in the row he is working on, then further up. Like art, or music—or writing come to think of it—it’s a matter of composition—of harmony—of aesthetics.

There’s a feeling that radiates off someone who has moved beyond mastery—a humility and happiness—a contented wisdom and timelessness that makes you go all philosophical—even if you just stand there and watch. I’ve been feeling that feeling all week long.

What’s a couple hundred years in a wall to a rock with a billion year resume?

Somewhere an old Finlander named Arvid is smiling.

Election Year Lawn Signs

Is it just me or are election year lawn signs contributing to political polarization more than they used to?

The wording hasn’t changed. It’s still just the candidate’s name… and maybe a slogan… or a party affiliation. But after all these years of talk radio, Internet politics, and angry cable TV pundits, we seem to have changed. The signs seem just a little more, “In your face” somehow.

Especially signs for candidates we don’t like.

A simple walk around the block seems to trigger a bout of smoldering, muttering, Minnesota-nice resentment… All those signs for the other guy… Why’d you move into this neighborhood anyhow?.

Darn that myopic so-and-so next door. Sure he lent you his snow shovel last March. Sure the shovel is still in your garage. But if he’s going to vote that way, you just might keep the shovel. You’re going to need it to dig out from under all the problems his candidate is going to aggravate instead of fix.

…If his candidate is elected, that is. Surely a plurality of Minnesotans could not possibly share that point of view.

Which brings us back to lawn signs. Minnesota human nature is such that we tend to use these signs as political barometers.

Never mind the polls. The more lopsided the neighborhood sign count, the more heartened or disheartened we become about our candidate’s chances in November. This time of year, any Democrat living in a Republican neighborhood—or any Republican living in a neighborhood that skews Democratic—is sure to be mired in a lawn sign funk that’s going to last through election day. The first holiday lights will be twinkling before the last neighborhood election year lawn signs disappear.

And it’s that funk—fostered in no small part by those lawn signs—that’s turning our politics so blue-and so blah.

One of these nights after supper, the phone is going to ring. I’ll pick it up and some precinct level volunteer will ask if they can come over and put in a lawn sign.

“Nah,” I’ll say. “We’re going to pass this year.

“See you on Election Day, but no signs. Not this year. Nope. No thanks.”

"Cut it out or I'll cream ya."

There was this day at the beginning of 7th grade when I saw a couple of kids from my class pushing a sixth grader around the playground at lunchtime recess—establishing the pecking order for the year, I guess.

Being one of the larger kids—way too big for even the eight graders to haze—I told them to cut it out or I’d cream them.

They cut it out. The sixth grader slipped away. The bell rang. No one got creamed.

The next day at lunch, I came around a corner of the school and found the sixth grader and a couple of his friends pushing around a wild-eyed little fourth grader.

So I told them to cut it out or I’d cream them. And they did. But the moment has been with me ever since.

What is it that turns people who’ve been hazed into hazers? How can they put experience and conscience aside and perpetuate this stuff? All these years later I still don’t get it.

It’s a testosterone-addled guy thing, I guess… A primitive socializing mechanism maybe… Bullying as ritual… Everyman’s chance to be the alpha dog for a few minutes… And a time-honored tradition too.

First you’re hazed. Then you haze someone yourself. Is this great or what? Pass it on.

Pass it on in the locker room. Pass it on at the frat house. Pass it on on the job or down at the club.

And most days, it seems foolhardy to try to make guys stop it. I mean what’s your problem? You can’t fight human nature. It’s just boys being boys.

My seventh grade classmates probably turned out to be fine men. The shifty little sixth grade hazee-turned-hazer is probably an okay guy too.

I’d like to think, though, that sometimes at night, just before they go to sleep, their consciences tweak them just a little; that they think back and wince about the hazing they took part in.

If, at this stage in life, their consciences don’t bother them, I hope a voice from somewhere deep in their memory speaks up and tells them, “Cut it out or I’ll cream ya.”

A Package From Gramma

The college kids have only just gone back to school. It’s a little early in the term for care packages from home. But my daughter just got one from her grandmother—my mother-in-law—and reports the contents as follows:

“…an assortment of prayer cards, a blue ribbon, a pre-printed pad of grocery shopping lists, address tags with Gramma’s address on them, a blue holographic "Freedom is not free" bookmark, and a 2010 calendar.”

It was one of my mother-in-law’s storied, “Everything-But-The-Kitchen-Sink,” packages, where she chooses a family member at random and bestows the flotsam and jetsam of her life upon them. Not all her flotsam and jetsam—she has ninety years worth. Only as much flotsam and jetsam as she can cram into one of those “All you can fit in ships for $7.50” post office boxes.

Everything has a hidden meaning. We’ve all learned to interpret the stuff she stuffed in. The prayer cards, for example. They reflect decades of devout Swedish Norwegian Irish Lutheran Catholicism. She’s telling my daughter to go to church

And the blue ribbon is a grandmotherly affirmation—a kind of a “You go, girl” across the decades. The shopping list note pad is a reminder to eat well. The address tags scream, “Don’t forget to write,” and the “Freedom is not free,” bookmark is part civics lesson, part reminder for my daughter to read and enrich her mind.

My mother-in-law is the queen of subliminal gift giving— in care packages, on birthdays or at the Holidays.

One year, for Christmas, she gave her know-it-all son-in-law, a furnace blower motor she’d found under the basement stairs. Another year, all her son-in-laws got nicely gift wrapped packages of grocery store meat. Not premium steaks. Nothing aged or exotic. The store label identified it as something called, “Random Meat” and it was approaching freshness code expiration.

Sitting there, I had to agree with her. From where she sat as the family matriarch, I, a middle-aged son-in-law, was indeed, “Random meat.”

There is more. So much more. There’s a parable in every present and care package she sends. But it’s probably best I end this here. I have a birthday coming up and I don’t want her to go out of her way and get me anything too… well… you know… thoughtful.

A fond-yet-surreal State Fair memory

There was a time at the state fair—a matter of a decade—maybe two—when they parked a beautifully-painted, refrigerated semi just outside the entrance to the Midway between the beer garden and the grandstand. Inside was a very dead, very frozen whale—an orca as I recall—named “L’il Orvy”.

L’il. L-I-apostrophe-l.

The people who owned Orvy blared a sideshow-like, “Yowsa-yowsa” spiel over a set of tinny loudspeakers. You paid your money. You shuffled up a set of stairs, into the trailer, and there he was. Yessir. Sure enough. Li’l Orvy—a dead frozen whale.

You shuffled the length of his carcass, out another door, back to terra firma. Squinting after having been inside the trailer, you’d feel a little fleeced and a little conflicted. You’d just paid good money to shuffle past a dead whale.

I’ve wondered for years about the people who showed Orvy. Who were they? Where’d they get him? And where’d they get the idea to truck him from fair to fair?

I’ve imagined them pitching the loan officer at the bank on the idea of financing the truck and trailer.

“It’s a frozen whale. We’re gonna call him L’il Orvy. L-I-apostrophe-l. We’re gonna show him at fairs. People will pay good money to see him…”

I’ve imagined Orvy in his trailer, bouncing just a bit on the Interstate between all those state fairs, less exhibit than cargo now.

I’ve even imagined the couple home for the winter, fair season over—she sitting on the sofa, feet tucked up under her, watching TV—he in the lounger reading pack issues of Popular Mechanics—and Lil Orvy in his trailer, refrigeration unit thrumming on the far side of the barn where they can’t hear it from the house.

They’re probably retired now. I hope they’ve retired Li’l Orvy too. After hundreds of thousands of miles and all that freezer burn, I hope he’s thawed and returned to dust.

This year, when I go to the fair, I will visit Li’l Orvy’s spot.

I will buy a sno cone in his honor and shuffle a ceremonial shuffle.

“Rest in peace,” I will whisper to Lil Orvy as the sno cone syrup trickles over my knuckles onto that hallowed ground. “Wherever you are, rest in peace.”

Mother is Facebooking

There is a point in middle age where you and the latest technologies part ways.

Your dollar store reading glasses won’t pick up the fine print in owner’s manuals. You lose your way—and lose faith—in the bewildering maze of menus that drop down or pop up as you struggle to program the latest gizmo or gadget.

You start to doubt your digital self. Like Grampa Joad on the way to “Californy” in “The Grapes of Wrath”, you hunker down in the dust at the side of the road and say, “I aint-uh-gonna go. Nossir. I aint-uh-gonna go.”

This technological pre-senility shows up all but automatically In your forties. It shows up with such regularity you could set your watch by it, assuming, of course, you understood the instructions that came with your watch—or that you wear a watch at all now that cell phones show the time.

I mention technological pre-senility because I was on Facebook after supper last night. And, there, in a little box over to the right, Facebook was suggesting a new “friend”—My mother.

Mom. On Facebook.

I won’t tell you how old she is, but her profile says she graduated from college in 1943. She lists herself as retired, but she still drives over and volunteers at the library two or three days a week. She takes side streets now—her one concession to age, She has sworn off driving the eight-lane wide two-way drag race that used to be Main Street.

So much for technological pre-senility. Her peers are fighting for an extra prune whip dessert down the street at the home… My peers are beginning to think prune whip sounds pretty good. Meanwhile, Mom is out there networking with people 1/8th her age.

All you Baby Boomers feeling entitled to give up on technology take notice. And all you Gen-X’ers feeling electronically sorry for yourselves—suck it up.

We’ve got generations of technology to master before we sleep. If my Mom can Facebook, surely we can program that new hi-def TV. Or at the very least set the blinking clock on the hopelessly out-of-date VHS recorder just below it.

So c’mon. What are we waiting for? We’ve got technologies to master. If Mom can, we all can. Let’s roll.